Category: News Feeds

What Biglaw firm (successfully) represented CBS in its efforts to overturn Federal Communications Commission fines over the Janet Jackson’s 2004 Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction?

Hint: The firm was founded in 1944 and has eight offices worldwide.

See the answer on the next page.

Many so-called trial lawyers and litigators spend much of their time alone, behind a desk. That time is essential, which is why at our firm, we heavily discourage use of social media and phones during the day because it’s so distracting. You need uninterrupted thinking time, a lot of it.

But that’s absolutely not all you need. You need to get experience in being an advocate. You have to fight. Experience can be hard to come by, especially for a young lawyer, but take it any chance you get it.

I was in court a short while ago where the court attorney was spending her morning resolving the discovery disputes before her. While waiting for their case to be called, co-counsel in an unrelated case were having trouble even getting their adversary to hear their arguments. But the co-counsel stayed tough, kept pushing their much more senior adversary, and the cantankerous adversary counsel yielded, if only a little bit.

However, the issue didn’t even get addressed by the court as another lawyer didn’t show, and the argument was adjourned. That can be frustrating. But this is the business — adjournments when you don’t want them.

More to my point, the two relatively junior co-counsel had the opportunity to fight. Their adversary may have been difficult as a person, but more importantly she was difficult as a lawyer. She wasn’t yielding easily. She pushed and pushed. That’s exactly the kind of adversary you want to have to teach you to be tough and to push yourself.

I don’t know the details of the discovery dispute and I might have groaned (as I’ve seen many a court attorney or magistrate judge or arbitrator do) given that all this lawyer time (and legal fees) were being devoted to such a dispute. It’s beyond the scope of this short piece how our discovery process is utterly broken and doesn’t advance justice as it should.

However, for younger lawyers it creates a great opportunity to train. Serve your client, yes, but take advantage of those disputes to learn how to fight. Don’t just complain about your adversary, beat her, and learn from her (those cantankerous types can be quite effective). Don’t lower yourself to the base means of a lawyer you don’t want to be. But do learn from that lawyer.

This is only one example of what may seem like an unpleasant or not fun situation that can teach you. For example, there is nothing for lawyer or any age like being yelled at, unfairly, by a judge that will teach you how to grow and be tough.

John Balestriere is an entrepreneurial trial lawyer who founded his firm after working as a prosecutor and litigator at a small firm. He is a partner at trial and investigations law firm Balestriere Fariello in New York, where he and his colleagues represent domestic and international clients in litigation, arbitration, appeals, and investigations. You can reach him by email at john.g.balestriere@balestrierefariello.com.

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts from Mainspring Legal’s team of expert contributors. David Lat, founder and former managing editor of Above the Law, recently joined Lateral Link as a managing director in the New York office.

In my new role as a legal recruiter, I spend much of my time speaking with Biglaw associates and partners about their career goals and aspirations. And I have quickly come to this conclusion: everyone wants to go in-house. So I’m delighted to present a great in-house position to the Above the Law audience.

An emerging growth company in the specialty pharma/life sciences/biotech space has exclusively retained Lateral Link to conduct a search for a Deputy General Counsel, to be located in the company’s headquarters in northern New Jersey. Interested candidates should submit their résumés to me via email: dlat@laterallink.com, subject line “In-House Opportunity.”

Reporting to the General Counsel (“GC”), the Deputy General Counsel will work closely with the GC, Chief Compliance Officer, business clients, and outside counsel on a wide range of corporate matters, including public company securities filings, corporate governance, M&A, and commercial contracts. The Deputy General Counsel will also support the General Counsel on existing business development initiatives. This is the first Deputy General Counsel role at this company, and it provides a unique opportunity for a lawyer to engage in the company’s strategic and business development efforts.

Requirements:

• J.D. with excellent academic credentials.
• 5+ years of experience with a major Am Law 200 law firm or corporate legal department.
• Expertise in securities law, especially public company reporting requirements and SEC filings.
• Experience with general corporate matters, including board resolutions and minutes and corporate authorization.
• Experience drafting, reviewing, and negotiating a wide variety of commercial contracts (e.g., supply agreements, master services agreements, consulting agreements).
• Desirable but not required: experience in the life-sciences industry, healthcare regulatory/compliance, M&A, litigation, intellectual property.
• Willingness to roll up sleeves and be involved in all legal aspects of a growing company; candidate must be a self-starter and have an entrepreneurial spirit and cooperative attitude, sound and practical business judgment, intellectual creativity, and problem-solving skills. As a core member of the legal team, candidate should have the highest level of integrity and ethics.
• Active membership in at least one state bar.

Compensation: Competitive base salary, bonus, stock options, ESPP plan, and benefits, commensurate with experience.

Travel: Minimal travel required.

Relos: Case by case (this search is national, although local candidates are preferred).

Bar: Active membership in at least one state bar.

Seniority Level: Senior director-level or VP-level position, commensurate with experience and ability.

If you satisfy the requirements listed above and would like to learn more about this job — or if you’d like to explore your career options more generally, including opportunities at other law firms — please submit your résumé to me via email: dlat@laterallink.com, subject line “In-House Opportunity.”

Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you!

Lateral Link is one of the top-rated international legal recruiting firms. With over 14 offices world-wide, Lateral Link specializes in placing attorneys at the most prestigious law firms and companies in the world. Managed by former practicing attorneys from top law schools, Lateral Link has a tradition of hiring lawyers to execute the lateral leaps of practicing attorneys. Click ::here:: to find out more about us.

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on motherhood in the legal profession, in partnership with our friends at MothersEsquire. Welcome Cristina Hendrick Stroh to our pages.

We all know that misconceptions and stereotypes run rampant in the world of the working mom. Someone commented to me the other day about how “lucky I was to have a career.”  That is laughable. Any working mom knows luck has little to do with it.

Let’s face it. There are conscious and unconscious biases everywhere, one of which being that moms are less dedicated to their careers than — or don’t work as hard as — their childless counterparts. While we know that’s not true and there are employers that are making strides in the right direction, it is still a real issue for a lot of women. Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you to limit the number of family pictures in your office to one. My strategy for combating this misconception is two-fold: results and relationships.

Results speak for themselves. If you always come through, your clients will have less reason to suspect that your children do or will have an adverse effect on your attention to their matters. Be efficient and be responsive. Get the job done even if it means answering a few emails after the kids are in bed.

Moms have to get lots of things done on tight timelines all the time. That skill might even make you better at getting the job done than someone without kids. If you have something that needs to be done, give it to the mom with 18,000 other things on her to-do list. She’ll handle it. I find that the more I have on my plate, the more efficient I become. I got my best grades in undergrad the semester that I took 18 hours and worked. Of course there’s a limit to this, and at some point, even Superwoman needs to evaluate her workload and set some boundaries.

Learn to effectively delegate what you can so that you can still deliver timely results for the client. This has been an area where I struggle, but it is a crucial aspect of workload management. It creates learning and career development opportunities for younger attorneys and paralegals, and it frees up space in your day for the next project on your list. Or for soccer practice.

Relationships are the other key to avoiding the misconception that work is not high on your priority list. Relationships with clients and colleagues are extremely important. It’s like any professional relationship — you need to keep it professional, but if you know each other personally, it makes everything a little easier.  

These days, it is perfectly acceptable in a group setting to ignore the people around you and work on your phone, but that sometimes leads to missed opportunities. When you are sitting around waiting for a meeting or conference call to start, instead of playing on your phone or responding to emails, actively engage the people around you. Ask about their families, their plans for the weekend or an upcoming holiday. Be genuine and be interested.

You don’t need to be their best friend, but if they like and respect you personally, it will be easier for them to give you the benefit of the doubt professionally. And let’s be honest, most people like talking about themselves. So it should be pretty easy to strike up a conversation instead of scrolling through Instagram. Obviously, the longer you work with someone the easier this becomes, but it’s a good habit to develop. You might even make some new friends.

I have two young children who are less than two years apart, and I’m consistently told how highly my clients regard me. When I need to reschedule a meeting because I have to go pick up a sick kid or I have to be out of the office to attend a school assembly, I can tell my clients that without the fear that they will feel like I am blowing them off.  My work speaks for itself, as does the giant bulletin board of family pictures in my office. Both are priorities in my life. Being a working parent is difficult, especially in these days when clients and opposing counsel often expect you to be connected 24/7. But if you deliver consistently and foster strong working relationships, it can go a long way toward making it easier to manage it all.

Earlier: Mothers At Law: Achieving Meaningful Success In The Legal Profession

Cristina Hendrick Stroh serves as Senior Real Estate Counsel for J.C. Penney Corporation, Inc. in Plano, Texas, where she has practiced since 2007. She concentrates on all aspects of acquisition, financing, leasing and disposition as well as ongoing operations matters in a 20-state territory including California and the Pacific Northwest. Cristina received her J.D. cum laude from the University of Houston Law Center and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining the Penney legal department, Cristina practiced real estate law with Schlanger, Silver, Barg & Paine, LLP in Houston, Texas. In 2015, Cristina was awarded the America Bar Association’s Excellence in Writing Award for authoring the Best Practical Use Article published in its Probate & Property Magazine. She currently lives in McKinney, Texas with her husband, two children, and two dogs.

A few years ago, representatives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce rolled up on Above the Law’s offices to chat with me about their work. It was a perfectly lovely meeting even though they were mostly bemoaning “trial lawyers” who they said were lobbying legislators to allow driverless cars to be regulated exclusively through post facto litigation.

“Balderdash!” I said. “That’s inefficient and dangerous.” They giddily agreed. “So I assume you’re backing a robust federal regulatory regime instead.”

This prompted awkward silence for a few beats. Government regulation is, after all, what the group spends the other half of its time fighting. Pushed to face the logical conclusion of shutting down one avenue of consumer protection, they cringed a bit at the realization that there’s really only one option left.

And that’s the whole problem. When the zero-sum nature of the competing pillars of the right-wing legal project gets exposed, there really isn’t a unifying logic to playing both sides of it other than “whatever lets a business incur harm on others without oversight.” But that doesn’t play as well on television as the faux aphorisms about “greedy trial lawyers” and “business-crushing regulation.” Tort reform isn’t much of a core philosophical truth, it’s mostly a catchphrase.

This anecdote is fresh in my mind today as conservatives are taking a victory lap after a bunch of townies outside Oberlin College formed a jury and awarded $44 million to a bakery that students protested and the school stopped using.

A jury has awarded $33.2 million in punitive damages to Gibson’s Bakery, whose owners claimed Ohio’s Oberlin College and an administrator hurt their business and libeled them during a dispute over a shoplifting episode that triggered protests and allegations of racial bias.

The Chronicle-Telegram reported the same jury awarded Gibson’s business and family members more than $11 million in actual or compensatory damages, bringing the total award to more than $44 million.

The facts, as they seem to be coalescing, is that the white bakery staff confronted a black patron who they said was shoplifting and this incident triggered protests. Assuming the bakery is, in fact, right, then… well they still probably don’t have a claim against the students. That seems very much a statement of opinion, but whatever. Let’s pretend there is a claim against the students. Is it a $44 million claim? For a bakery in a town of 8,000 people? Absolutely not.

This isn’t even like the class actions that tort reformers routinely complain about where the whole point of the oversized award is to compensate a large class of not necessarily known victims and award lawyers taking a public interest risk of self-financing a litigation on behalf of those victims. This is a discrete incident. The damages are easily calculable and hardly $11 million.

And to go after the school?!? I’m old enough to remember when conservatives passionately argued that private schools, like Oberlin, should have the right to be segregated. Now private schools can get sued for making… business decisions on where they choose to buy cakes? Even taking the most tenuous “tortious interference” logic — which is really out there — to get the school into this case, it still couldn’t remotely add up to this award.

Meanwhile, the National Review, a bastion of conservative thought that has repeatedly trumpeted tort reform for years, called it a “Blueprint for Fighting Back.” Presumably the “fight” is against people who complain about “racism” and “sexism” and the like. Others derpheads joined in.

The last Tweet’s point is that the school was really asking for it when it suggested that a big award would hurt students… a group that the town almost assuredly loathes despite their economy largely revolving around the school. Cutting off noses to spite faces and all that rot.

Walter Olson of the CATO Institute deserves a lot of credit here since he appears to be the only prominent legal conservative willing to stand up for the principles he’s espoused his whole career:

He also shared a long Twitter thread that succinctly goes through how much of a non-case the bakery actually had:

I fear Olson may be learning what a lot of us already sussed out. There’s not really an appetite out there for his ideas on “tort reform.” There’s just an appetite for trolling “social justice warriors” and he’s only managed to intersect with those people throughout his career in an alliance of convenience. When the chips are really down, they’re ready to torch his passion project in an instant.

This is an embarrassment to the justice system even for those of us with a forgiving view of the appropriate extent of tort damages. For anyone who’s ever called for tort reform, it should be a disgrace.

But that would require internal logical consistency… something in short supply these days.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

Pride month is in full swing, so it only makes sense to focus on some progress being made in Biglaw firms. We’ve been hearing that some prominent Biglaw firms are making a genuine effort to be inclusive to trans/genderqueer/nonbinary folks. As a tipster reports:

[The firm] offers She/Her, He/Him and They/Them pronoun options for students and attorneys to add to their nametags, if they’d like to do so, out on the nametag table at every event….Many students and attorneys [] have been wearing the ribbon in solidarity and to make those in the LGBTQ+ community feel more comfortable wearing one should they choose or need to.

The firm in question began using the ribbons during the last recruiting cycle, and now we understand the practice is set to spread to other Biglaw firms, just in time for recruiting season to begin. Hopefully, this soon becomes the standard in the industry. (We’ve reached out to the firm(s) involved but have yet to hear back. If your firm is doing something similar, please email and let us know.)

This serves as an important reminder that pronouns matter. And while this Biglaw firm may not include all gender-neutral pronouns in common usage (for example ze/zir), it breaks down the assumption that you should know someone’s pronouns just by looking at them.

It’s a remarkably simple move, but one that goes pretty far in setting the tone of inclusion.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).